DIY Needle Felted Cat Toys

I’ve had some requests to do more cat projects and I’ve been meaning to put together a needle felting tutorial, so I decided to combine those two ideas together. So today I’ll be showing you how to make some needle felted cat toys! I made three different types, one stuffed with cat nip, one stuffed with jingly bells and one stuffed with a crinkly plastic bag.

-some wool-a felting needle-a felting surface – typically people use a foam block or a bristle brush but I’m using a burlap pillow thing I made. If you’re interested in learning how to make one of these, stay tuned next week and i’ll show you how!-some goodies to put in the middle of the toy. These are optional.The reason wool fibers felt together has to do with how the fibers are made up. Like human hair, wool fibers have tiny scales all over them, however, the wool fiber scales stick out way more. So when the fibers are rubbed together, whether with hot soapy water, like in wet felting, or through stabbing with a felting needle, they hook on to eachother. So whenever you felt, essentially you’re creating a big ball of tangled fur.Also, you can’t just use a normal needle to felt, you have to use a special needle. You can see here how it has little tiny hooks all over it and these grab the felt and pull them down, rubbing them against the rest of the wool fibers as you stab.

First, here’s the cat nip stuffed toy:

Take a chunk of wool and lay it on your felting surface. I’m using a different color than what the leaf will be,
but you don’t have to do that. If you’re going to make a green leaf, you can use green for this core piece.
Roll it upand start stabbing it with the needle!
You want to make sure to periodically re-position the felt to keep it from felting into the felting surface.
Be mindful of your fingers. Getting stabbed with that needle hurts. I know from experience. They sell finger covers you can wear while you felt, but I like to live on the edge.
Take a larger piece of felt, in the color you want the leaf to be, and wrap it around the core. Mine ended up being about palm sized before I began felting it. The felting process shrinks it down a bit since it packs the fibers together when it tangles up.
And start stabbing all over.
Once i starts to hold itself together you can concentrate on shaping it.
Make it into a triangle by concentrating on stabbing at the sides
Once it’s in a triangleish shape, start stabbing in the middle of the short side of the leaf to make it into a sort of soft heart shape.
Now take a small piece of brown wool, twist it between your fingers to make a long snake of wool
Place it on the leaf like so.
Start stabbing at it to join it to the leaf. Make sure you stab this part good so your cat doesn’t just rip it right off when they start playing with it!
Repeat this with smaller pieces of brown wool to make the rest of the veins on the leaf.
I gave the leaf another once over all over with the needle to make sure it was felted tightly.

Once you have the veins all attached and the leaf is felted nice and tight, you’re done!

And now, the jingly bell toy:

Next, I’ll show you a toy that I stuck some jingly balls in the middle.
I could only find these tiny jingly balls at my local craft store, but I’d suggest getting ones bigger than this. After felting I feel like these tiny ones lost of lot of their jinglyness. They still worked, just not as well as I wanted.
Basically you’re going to repeat the first step of the catnip toy, but with a jingly ball instead of catnip. I actually stuck two in there instead of just one since they were so tiny. And again, I used a different color for the core than the finished product, but that’s not necessary.
And start stabbing! Now, take it slow when you’re felting this one. There’s metal in the middle and if you just stab at it wildly you’ll probably hit the bells and break your needle.
Once it’s pretty tight, take another, bigger chunk of wool wrap it around and start felting.
This toy is going to just be a ball shape, so all you have to do is to stab it all over evenly and it’ll form a ball.
If you didn’t use enough felt and it starts to shrink down too much, just add more wool and keep felting.

Once it’s felted tightly then you’re done!

Finally, the crinkly bag stuffed toy:

Now this last one was kind of an experiment and it actually ended up working out pretty decently. Some cats really like toys that crinkle, and I’ve heard of people making toys stuffed with plastic bags, so I thought i’d try to do something similar with a felted toy!
I had this leftover packaging from the blue wool, so I just crumbled it up into a ball, wrapped it with wool and started felting.
I ended up making this one slightly into an egg shape.

And there we go, three types of needle felted cat toys!The catnip laced toy is Gremlin’s favorite.

I hope you (and your cat!) enjoyed this project! Next week I’ll be doing a tutorial on how to make the felting surface, so stay tuned if you’re interested!